The amount of genuinely good and successful live service games is so minimal that it’s actual insanity seeing AAA execs trying to reinvent the wheel and failing every time.

The only ones I play these days are Warframe and occasionally PoE2, both relatively smaller dev teams with large publisher backing but mostly left to their own devices to do whatever the fuck they want. Coming from the predatory FOMO hell that was Destiny 2, getting into similar games but ones that actually respect the players is refreshing.

I have zero interest in throwaway AAA slop in general, let alone with all the usual live service shit tacked on.

Uh oh. I’m starting it tonight.

Some dude pushed himself to finish it all in a weekend because he had a busy week ahead and was in shambles. Man was not made to handle that much feels in such a short period 🥲

This is… but the prologue. Steel yourself. You’ll need it.

The gaming scene outside of AAA studios has been about as vibrant as it’s ever been.

Most of the nominees for GOTY have been AA studios at best and this was a stellar year imo with titles like Silksong, Hades 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Clair Obscur, Blue Prince, Dispatch, and The Alters to name a few!

And all of those games (other than Dispatch and Thealters, which I haven’t played yet) are absolute bangers with hundreds of hours of content for the price of 1/7th a stick of RAM.

::: spoiler spoiler <e: apparently spoilers don’t work for some users> :::

Right? After AC3 i stopped caring.

I firmly believe we are entering the dark ages of AAA games, with the cost to make and GenAI they are going to be shit.

Support indie devs.

Because filthy rich is more attractive for capital.

We are at a point now that games from the PS3/X360 era still look and play well, so newer titles need to contribute something new in order to make an impact.

If a AAA-studio releases a 7/10 title in 2026, it’s not just competing with the 8s, 9s, and 10s also releasing the same year - but also every single such title from the past 20 years!

This will also only continue to get worse in coming years as the backlog of exceptional titles will continue to build.

For the last little while now, I’ve been finding that my most played games have been on my old 360 that I decided to plug in again, and my old old PS2 collection that I ripped and loaded to an emulator because the old hardware broke a long time ago.

Third place is “new to me” games that I finally buy when they go on a good sale years after they were “new” (is. RDR2 and Cyberpunk)

I haven’t bought a new AAA title in years on console because I can’t justify the cost.

The only ones I play these days are Warframe and occasionally PoE2…

I didn’t know they made Power over Ethernet into a game, let alone a sequel.

Yeah. I guess I’m too old to understand the drive for better and better graphics.

To me, you don’t repaint a new version of the Mona Lisa just because we have better paints available today.

Graphics (for me) peaked in the 360/PS3 era when games started to nail smooth “movement”. After that it was just about making things more and more photorealistic, which is so completely uninteresting to me because I’m playing a game.

Painkiller wasn’t great either. Just saying.

I have played all the way through all the resident evil series, picking up the last 3 when they came out, which is rare for me. I am usually a patient gamer. I assume RES is a AAA game, but correct me if I am wrong.

Point is each one has been fantastic. Not many games hold my attention like those do. So apparently it can be done. Hoping the next one out soon is just as good.

Oh, and I played all of them on Linux, they worked flawlessly.

PS2 games look and play great on the Steamdeck. Probably my favorite way to play them.

By the way, I have a couple of PS2’s, and I use a harddrive so the hardware just keeps working. Usually it is the laser that fails. There are also options to network and play from NAS, or use a micro SD.

I think their point is AAA studios could already have been doing things to gauge feedback but that they are largely greedy entities which would prioritize the profit that could be extracted from a scenario over the value it could provide to the game.

I’ve already beaten the game so idm but at least on the app I’m using, there is no censor bar effect on your comment.